Solana cannot be the 'global backbone' of blockchain, says Ethereum community member

Solana cannot serve as the backbone of the so-called “new” global financial system, according to ethereum community member Ryan Berckmans.

Solana (SOL) moved from its initial “monolithic” approach to recognizing the importance of Layer 2 solutions. But Berckmans notes in x that Solana was initially touted as being able to handle global transactions on a single chain. This was before they renamed their L2 solutions to “Network Extensions” instead of recognizing them as L2.

Solana's gradual recognition of ethereum's (eth) L2 backbone strategy came after seeing flagship applications creating custom L2 application chains on their network.

This shift in perspective became more pronounced when a major Solana development team went on to build an L2 SVM on ethereum.

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Several barriers in front of Solana

Berckmans, who spent eight months as a senior engineer on Project Augur, a prediction platform on the ethereum blockchain, identifies barriers preventing Solana from becoming a global backbone.

First, Solana operates with only one production customer (agave oxide). A global backbone requires at least three independent customer chains with a balanced distribution of participation, he says.

The development of its second client, Firedancer, faces significant delays due to the lack of a proper protocol specification and research community.

Solana's high bandwidth requirements, which recommend 10 Gbps upload, create significant centralization risks and practical limitations.

This requirement particularly challenges the notion of a global backbone that should be able to operate anywhere.

The platform's history of outages and lack of protocol-level backup capabilities pose additional risks.

Unlike ethereum, Berckmans stated that Solana lacks the ability to continue producing blocks when completion issues occur.

According to Berckmans, economic centralization presents another major concern. With about 98% internal allocation of its initial coin offering, compared to 80% for ethereum's public sale, Solana faces questions about true decentralization.

The emergence of zk test aggregation for L2 settlement further challenges Solana's position. While Solana focuses on scaling L1 execution, this approach conflicts with the requirements of a global backbone.

Looking ahead, Berckmans predicts that Solana's year-over-year market share will continue to decline compared to ethereum's combined L1 and L2 ecosystem. He cites large corporations like Coinbase, Kraken, Sony, and Visa choosing ethereum L2 solutions as proof of market direction.

The analysis concludes that while Solana has demonstrated strength in areas such as meme coin growth and price appreciation, its fundamental limitations prevent it from serving as the backbone of a global financial system.